Blog

Read about Consequential Robotics point of view on the latest robotics news, updates and trends. Learn more about the future of social robots and the impact they have on the quality of life as people age. Our writers will share robotics research ideas and challenges to the robotics community.

Hotly discussed by a panel of experts at the Science in Public Conference hosted at the University of Sheffield. Organiser Michael Szollosy, Research Fellow at Sheffield Robotics shares the key talking points that were raised for using AI to shape human societies.

Globally, the proportion of people aged 60 or over was just 8% in 1950 but this is projected to rise to 20% by 2050. In many European countries, and in Asian economies including Korea, Japan, and China, the proportion of people age 60+ will be approaching 40% by 2050. As a global business and growth opportunity, assistive robots and services present significant possibilities.

As technology companies and product designers begin to focus on developing robots for social care, they will also start to consider the research challenges. Professor Tony Prescott recently co-authored the whitepaper on Robotics in Social Care: A Connected Care EcoSystem for Independent Living. Read more to learn about the twelve key research challenges identified in the whitepaper.

Since MIRO was launched into the market place, the team at Consequential Labs has been working tirelessly (well…) to keep the software updated, ironing out bugs as they have been reported and adding a little additional functionality here and there. Dr Ben Mitchinson (or Mitch as we like to call him here) talks about software update 171012 and the many things that team CqR Labs have been busy working on.

Meet Boris Mocialov, a PhD student at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics which is led by Heriot-Watt University. Boris has a background in computer science and software engineering and got into robotics through an interest in artificial intelligence. He works on grounding the semantics of sign languages in a task. Most recently, he has been working on the recognition of sign languages.

Many Japanese robot builders have been drawn to the humanoid model with Honda’s Asimo often specifically demonstrated in the ‘robot butler’ role. Asimo is not available in the shops, but Pepper, the humanoid robot developed by Softbank, has been sold to many Japanese homes.

This week we caught up with Joseph Daly, a PhD student based at Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Joe has a background in psychology, which initially sounds unrelated to robotics, but is becoming increasingly relevant as robots start to share spaces with human beings. Most recently, he looked at people’s willingness to help a robot in need depending on its emotional behaviour.

Tony Prescott, the Director of Sheffield Robotics shares his thoughts on robot companions, real and imagined, focusing on some of the best known screen robots of all time, those of the Star Wars film series—C-3PO, R2-D2 and most recently BB-8. What do these iconic droids tell us about our future relationships with robots?